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In 1995, the pioneering work of Richard Grove pointed to tropical islands as a key site for examining early Western environmental thought in the context of imperial European expansion between 1660 and 1860. Megan Raby, for her part, situates the scientific birth of the modern concept of biodiversity on US tropical research stations in the circum-Caribbean during and after the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. To do so, Raby analyzes the role of North American biologists and scientists in stations created in Cuba, Jamaica, British Guiana (today Guyana), and Panama. She structures the book in five chapters, an epilogue, and appendices, all based on extensive archival research.

Raby has made a significant contribution to the study of the American tropics at the intersection of intellectual history, the history of place-based field practices, and postcolonial studies. One of her principal interventions is the clear dialogue she establishes between the study of science and empire and the study of the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and practices. In this case, the author examines biology and tropical ecology as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge within the colonial and postcolonial circum-Caribbean. Raby asserts that ideas, attitudes, and institutions forged in field sites like, for example, the tropical biological research stations founded in the circum-Caribbean were crucial to understanding the emergence of new paradigms in biology and conservation at the end of the twentieth century.

Raby underlines the role that stations played in forming a community of American biologists, whose lives and work in the region changed their vision of tropical nature as a means of explaining the biological and evolutionary reasons by which these islands came to be reservoirs of species diversity. In this manner, such islands were paradigmatic examples of “residential science,” a phrase introduced by Robert E. Kohler to characterize a common mode of intensive fieldwork. To this point, studies have drawn a subtle border between European scientific practices identified with taxonomy and collection in the long nineteenth century and American science carried out in the tropics in the early twentieth. This book suggests, instead, the need for comparative studies between imperial European science and American science that look for continuities and discontinuities in colonial and neocolonial research projects.

Likewise, Raby reminds us that biologists were interested in the diversity of tropical life but also in its potential as an economic resource. In this way, she highlights the complex conjuncture of patronage and intellectual, political, and military agendas at work in the tropics. Raby argues that tropical research stations became important spaces not only for the training of biologists but also for their introduction into a web of academics, businessmen, and actors representing national interests who shared in the formation of tropical biology. For Raby, field research sites became nodes of scientific migration that gave form to scientific communities wherein individuals shared interests regarding research, practices, and priorities, even if their ecological research is what interests her most.

Raby delves into these questions in order to study the production of knowledge within this relationship between science and empire. The association between science and business characterized more than just the work of American biologists in the twentieth century. Similar relationships were at work, for example, with regard to Cuban agronomists affiliated with fertilizer companies during earlier moments of expanding American hegemony. For Raby, the Harvard Botanical Garden, later the Harvard Atkins Institution, was established to serve the needs of American agribusiness, and thus exemplifies the broad movement to bring scientific agriculture to backward American territories and protectorates. This station illustrated the relationship between science, business, and slavery. The origin and financing of the station came from the hands of Edwin F. Atkins, a Boston-born sugar baron with properties in Cuba who desired to obtain hybrid sugar cane for his former slave plantation in Cuba. Raby studies the creation of research sites within the Harvard Botanical Garden that indicate how the flexibility of scientific spaces allowed them to contribute to both pure research and applied science.

The author also takes a novel approach to the work of representative figures in tropical biology as key architects of the new discipline of ecology. One of those was Thomas Barbour, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard between 1920 and 1940. Raby shines light on the little-known role Barbour played in connecting tropical research stations in Cuba and Panama. At the same time, Raby asserts that the central participation of Barbour in the Harvard Botanical Garden and Barro Colorado shifted the emphasis of these two institutions to tropical ecology, without forgetting their earlier focus on applied biology.

One of Raby’s key contributions is to give us a longue durée study within a historiography of colonial and postcolonial science generally confined to the nineteenth century. This permits her to observe the impact of key Caribbean sociopolitical and economic processes on the tropical biological community. In her telling, events like the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, the construction of the Panama Canal, and the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s all modulated the spaces of ecological investigation. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, in this reading, matters in part because it frustrated the stability of American biologists’ field sites at the Harvard Botanical Station.

Raby rightly employs the phrase “American tropics” to emphasize the colonial connotation of their origin. That is to say, on one side, Raby underlines the place of biology in the construction of American hegemony. On the other side, she explains the heft, even today, that tropical American ecologies bear over Latin American and Caribbean contributions within related associations and publications.

This book is eminently recommendable. Raby has given us needed insight into the history of tropical American science within the context of imperial expansion and the construction of Caribbean hegemony. I would have liked to see, however, more on the interaction between American tropical biologists and the local scientific community in a process that was, on many occasions, one of negotiation and, on others, hybridization. This work, as Raby notes, remains to be continued.